Department News

Below are articles from various sources about members of MCB and their research.

December 09, 2009

In a report in this week's early online edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, University of California, Berkeley, researchers show that the H1N1, or swine flu, virus adopted a new mutation in one of its genes distinct from the mutations found in previous flu viruses, including those responsible for the Spanish influenza pandemic of 1918, the "Asian" flu pandemic in 1957 and the "Hong Kong" pandemic of 1968.

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December 09, 2009

The latest issue of the graduate student-run Berkeley Science Review features the research of several MCB faculty members, including Yang Dan, Diana Bautista, and

November 20, 2009

Erol Kepkep began working at the campus‰Ûªs Department of Instruction in Biology in 1987, when he was an undergraduate completing a double major in molecular biology and genetics. In 1989, he moved into the Molecular and Cell Biology Department, where he and his staff are responsible for two Biology 1A lab classrooms. Among the challenges of the job: tracking the lab‰Ûªs snakes and crocodiles when they go missing, juggling enrollment for 600-plus students each semester, and helping protozoans and cyanobacteria flourish.

November 20, 2009

President Barack Obama's stimulus package is already stimulating innovation and jobs at the University of California, Berkeley, with more than 130 projects underway. The work is being funded by nearly $65 million in new money from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA).

November 16, 2009

New findings by University of California, Berkeley, scientists including Molecular & Cell Biology Associate Professor Abby Dernburg show that the cell's cytoskeleton, which moves things around in the cell, plays a critical role, essentially reaching into the nucleus to bring chromosome pairs together in preparation for recombination and segregation.

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October 07, 2009

The bulk of the work for which Elizabeth Blackburn, Carol Greider and John Szostak won this year's Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine took place at the University of California, Berkeley, when Blackburn was a professor of molecular and cell biology and Greider was her graduate student.

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September 28, 2009

Kathleen Collins, a professor in the Department of Molecular & Cell Biology, has made it her business to understand everything she can about this so-called immortality enzyme. Her discoveries about its regulation, assembly and connections to human disease are leading the way toward methods to regulate its production and perhaps treat disorders such as cancer.

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September 28, 2009

Jocelyn E. Krebs who received her PhD from the Department of Molecular & Cell Biology is now the lead author on the newest edition (10th) of a classic molecular biology textbook, now called Lewin's GENES X.

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September 22, 2009

Assistant Professor Lin He (Cell & Developmental Biology) has been named as a prestigious MacArthur "genius" fellow for 2009. MacArthur fellows are selected for their "creativity, originality, and potential" and are awarded $500,000 over 5 years with unrestricted usage.

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September 17, 2009

A new way to select and switch on one cell type in an organism using light has helped answer a long-standing question about the function of one class of enigmatic nerve cells in the spinal cord.

Claire Wyart, post-doctoral fellow in the Isacoff lab at UC Berkeley's Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, and UCSF post-doctoral fellow Filippo Del Bene are the joint first authors of a paper describing these results that appears in the Sept. 17 issue of the journal Nature.